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Microsoft backs Chinese XML document format

It’s working on translation tools for Open XML and China’s Uniform Office Format

Microsoft Corp. today said it will work with the Chinese government to craft tools for translating documents between the company’s Open XML and China’s home-brewed Uniform Office Format (UOF).

UOF, yet another XML-based document format — Microsoft’s Open XML and OpenOffice.org’s Open Document Format, or ODF, are the others — is Chinese-specific and popularized by RedOffice, the open-source suite spun off from OpenOffice.org and used by more than 100 local governments, including the city of Beijing.

Microsoft will collaborate with Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing Information Technology Institute (BITI), Tsinghua University and LitSoft, part of the Lenovo Group on the project. The resulting tools will be posted on the open source download site SourceForge, which other Microsoft-assisted work, including several Open XML-ODF translators, already call home.